Forgive me if this sounds antithetical to the entire purpose of our great webzine, but I believe I’ve stumbled onto something in my expensed international travels. This occurred to me when I noticed myself picking up the hotel phone and simply dialing out at $2/minute. I could have used Google Voice, which would be free. But that would require heavier lifting and might result in poor voice quality. So screw it — it’s not my money, I’ll just use what’s easy and familiar.
When people have more money to spend on communicating, they’re not doing it by any terribly innovative method. Rather, they’re falling back to age-old methods that have gotten relatively more expensive, such as landlines. It’s those with less money for whom technology has been particularly useful; services like Google Voice or Skype allow them to make phone calls for free using their computers.
And that is the extent to which technological innovations have done more to bring previously expensive forms of communication into the mainstream than they have to expand the forms of communication available at the top-end. I imagine that if there were more useful but costlier forms of communication, I would use them (more Starpoints!), but until then, I’ll rely on whatever gets the job done with the least effort.
